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17 July 2003
I love sports games, think they’re brilliant. And I’m sure I’ve played loads of them on every system imaginable. Only when it came to putting this list together, I wrote five down quick as a flash, then sort of fumbled around for the rest.
- Ignition
- Um. A driving game I bought. It was quite fun. Crashes when I play it on my new PC.
- Everybody’s Golf 2
- Fiddly golf game (although that might be down to the controller) for the PSX.
- Beach Spikers Extreme Volleyball
- It’s a poor second to tennis, but volleyball’s certainly a fun game to play four-player. Especially when it’s women’s beach volleyball.
- World Championship Snooker
- Is snooker a sport, really? I think it is, but I’m a fan. And to be honest, this game’s really quite poor, especially graphically, and with the patented Codemasters-lazily-porting-from-the-console-version menu system. Only worth playing if you can’t go play the real thing.
- Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater
- I can’t stand skateboarding, and I’ve never really understood the attraction, but I played this game to death when it came out. To me, the sequels never captured the elegant simplicity of the first version, making combos too easy to come by and adding frivolous game modes galore.
- Mario Kart
- If I liked racing more then this would be higher, because both the SNES version and the Nintendo 64 version were excellent games. The main disappointment is the contrast between the original’s Rainbow Road, which was the toughest level in the game, and the updated version’s, which was the longest and most boring. The Bowser and Yoshi levels went some way to rectifying that, though.
- Virtua Tennis
- Sega-developed tennis game featuring real players and
‘only’
two shot buttons, one of which was to send up a lob. If you’re the least bit savvy, then you’ll know that this means the developers did a tremendous amount of work to make all kinds of non-lob shots available with one button and four directions. The rallies in high-difficulty doubles matches were just plain punishing. The best tennis game ever, unless…
- Mario Tennis
- …is better. I don’t know, really I don’t. It doesn’t have real players, but bright, sharp graphics and astounding physics for what could have been a shameless cash-in. Although Virtua Tennis is tougher at first, this gets nigh-on impossible in the later stages. So it wins for that reason. (OK, that and Daisy.)
- Championship Manager
- If it weren’t for the abomination that is the newest version, could well be top. Massive database of players, massive potential for twiddling, incredibly realistic. Addictive on a scale that no other game can reach, especially in windowed mode.
- Winning Eleven
- Football deprivation’s putting these at the top of the list, but there’s no better sport than football, and no better football series than the Winning Eleven one. You could play the most recent version (6 Final Evolution)